Monday, April 3, 2017

Robert Bloch in some of his best collections of short fiction: redux for Bloch Centennial Week

Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber were the two most important writers to be mentored by H. P. Lovecraft, and were younger members of the group of corresponding friends known as the Lovecraft Circle, which also included Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth and a small slew of others; while Derleth would not only be Lovecraft's primary publisher after his early death but would write endless pastiches of HPL's work, often based however tenuously on unpublished fragments among Lovecraft's papers, it was Bloch and Leiber who really picked up the ball with Lovecraft's primary innovation, an emphasis on existential horror in a supernatural context...humanity wasn't in trouble so much (or at least not so primarily) because of being the prize in a struggle between good and evil gods and demons, so much as because we were just another incidental item in the environment of entities and forces that took note of us, if they could at at all, only when it suited them...and our welfare was never much of their concern, when they had concerns. Of course, both Bloch and Leiber also wrote more traditional horror and fantasy fiction, and hybrids as well...but both also went on to explore new implications of their most Lovecraftian work, and find their own voices...Bloch particularly fascinated by psychopathia and Leiber with the evolution of myth...as might well be demonstrated by their most influential early stories: Bloch's "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" and Leiber's "Smoke Ghost"...and, of course, Bloch would eventually become most famous for creating Norman Bates and his family motel, as the author of Psycho, and Leiber perhaps dually as the chronicler of the picaresque fantasy adventurers Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and for his most famous and durable horror novel, Conjure Wife. And then there were the best of succeeding generations of Lovecraftian-influenced writers: Ramsey Campbell and Fred Chappell, Thomas Ligotti and T.E.D. Klein, and others. All diverse talents, and none moreso than Bloch...as his two late 1970s career retrospective collections of short fiction, both selected by Bloch himself, helped demonstrate...even given that they pointedly only took from certain areas of Bloch's writing. The Best of slightly overrepresented Bloch's science-fictional work (while also including fantasy and horror fiction), in part because much of it was close to his heart and in part because it was being published in Ballantine's sf/fantasy line, so a year and change later, a second collection focused more thoroughly on his horror and including no little of his more outre suspense fiction, was issued as a natural companion.

The Best of Robert BlochRobert Bloch(Ballantine 0-345-25757-X, Nov ’77, $1.95, 397pp, pb)

Everything in these books ranges from good to brilliant (from the surreal South African psychodrama "The Funnel of God" to the gentle nostalgic fantasy of "The Movie People", the key run-ups to Psycho "Lucy Comes to Stay" and "I Do Not Love Thee, Doctor Fell") and while Bloch would go onto further good short (and long) work in the decade and half after the publication of the latter book, reading such later collections as Midnight Pleasures andCold Chillswill give you a better sense of his late career than you'll get from, for example, The Selected Stories of Robert Bloch, which was reprinted in paperback in a typo-ridden edition with the utterly fraudulent title The Complete Stories of Robert Bloch. (As I mentioned to Sergio Angelini not too long ago, the complete short Bloch fiction would run more to thirty volumes than this set's three.) Looking at the contents of the three-volume set again, I see that while it does include some rather minor Bloch stories, and while overlapping heavily with these two volumes above for some reason omits such obvious stories as "That Hell-Bound Train", it, too, is a decent representation of Bloch's shorter work...but the awful packaging and error-riddled text of the paperback edition makes it a poor choice for first reading. You should read "Water's Edge", though...and won't suffer with "Talent" nor "The Animal Fair"...but "Freak Show" was a very poor choice to end with. Bloch's humorous fantasies, the Damon Runyonesque Lefty Feep stories and his Thorne Smith pastiches and others, are mostly missing from these volumes as well...among much else. And then there are the novels, and the occasional nonfiction...The Lost Bloch collections are utterly recommended...

· Sweet Sixteen [originally published as “Spawn of the Dark One”] · ss Fantastic May ’58

· That Hell-Bound Train · ss F&SF Sep ’58

· Enoch · ss Weird Tales Sep ’46

And (courtesy of The Unofficial Robert Bloch Website) of the much later 1980 Jove/HBJ paperback edition (with stories included in more recent collections removed, and some from his unreprinted first collection, The Opener of the Way, Arkham House, 1945, added):Sweets to the SweetThe Dream-MakersThe Sorcerer's ApprenticeI Kiss Your ShadowThe Proper SpiritThe CheatersHungarian RhapsodyThe Light-HouseThe Hungry HouseSleeping Beauty Sweet Sixteen The Mandarin’s Canaries · ss Weird Tales Sep ’38Return to the Sabbath · ss Weird Tales Jul ’38One Way to Mars · ss Weird Tales Jul ’45

Perhaps oddly, it was originally rather difficult for me to find an image of the hardcover edition of Blood Runs Cold, only the fourth collection of Robert Bloch's short stories, his second after the success of the film adaptation of Psycho would saddle him with an identifier-phrase for the rest of his life (and one often advertised on his books, as with the Popular Library paperback edition above, in type larger than his name is set in). I've in fact never seen the "Inner Sanctum Mystery" edition (as opposed to a photo) from Simon and Schuster, as far as I know, but the paperback is fairly common, even 47 years later. And if that isn't Janet Leigh swallowing her fist on the cover (I don't think so), Popular Library sure hoped you'd think it was.The first collection he published in the wake of Psycho the film, with Arkham House, was Pleasant Dreams (1960--see the little photo for its cover), which is a clangorous book, perhaps the best non-retrospective collection of Bloch's career, and for some reason has never gotten a true paperback reprint...Belmont, that low-rent pb publisher, in 1961 did a Very abridged 10-story version that took its title from the hardcover's subtitle, Nightmares, and in 1979, Jove (formerly Pyramid) offered an somewhat abridged version of Pleasant Dreams which managed to cite three of the dropped stories on its back-cover copy (perhaps the stories were left out because "Enoch," "Mr. Steinway," and "That Hell-Bound Train" were still in print in the 1977 Ballantine collection The Best of Robert Bloch, but that's a sorry excuse). Even without those three stories, Pleasant Dreams is a fine collection...but not so much better than Blood Runs Cold as to justify the large discrepancy between the asking prices of the two books, particularly the paperbacks.It's also odd that before I picked it up again, I remembered Blood Runs Cold as primarily a suspense-fiction collection, versus Pleasant Dreams as a mostly-horror assembly. PDis nearly all horror, and Blood is mostly suspense fiction...but the newer book is eclectic, including the gentle fantasy "All on a Golden Afternoon," three sf stories (and one borderline sf/fantasy satire of the sort Playboy was always happy to publish, "Word of Honor"), one in each of Bloch's usual modes when approaching science fiction: ultraviolet humor and heavy metaphor ("Daybroke") and somewhat less gallows humor and slightly less heavy metaphor ("Where the Buffalo Roam") with the last a fine grim twist/joke-story (with no metaphoric freight to speak of) I won't spoil here by naming, along with a straightforward horror story ("The Pin"). But most of the collected works here are tales of very bad behavior in the (then) here and now, with a few historical fictions mixed in. You get Bloch's best suspense short story, by me, "Final Performance," with the brilliant one-sentence opening paragraph "The neon intestines had been twisted to form the word Eat." That the resonance of that line will be amplified by the end of the story is just one of its masterful aspects...and it's notable that Bloch, presumably, sequenced the charming "...Afternoon" as the next story after this one. Anyone who's read Bloch realizes that his characters are often as doomed as any of those in Cornell Woolrich or Jim Thompson's work, but Bloch is often cool and keeping a certain distance from those often not-so-beautiful losers, which (along with the strong streak of humor that runs through most of his work) has often kept him from being considered properly among his peers in crime fiction. But as he demonstrates even with another, brief joke story of sorts, "The Show Must Go On," he can put you into the mind of the deranged as well as anyone who's written in these fields, and with "Show Biz," he gives you some very professional, very ugly folks you don't ever want to meet. "I Do Not Love Thee, Doctor Fell" is, along with "Lucy Comes to Stay," the most obvious antecedent to Psycho the novel among Bloch's works, and as such suffers in comparison with the novel, but the story is still worth reading and not just for its historical importance.It was after reading "The Big Kick," I think, that my friend Alice asked me, "Bloch doesn't seem to like the Beats very much, does he?" It's true that a number of his villains are countercultural (as are a similar number of his heroines/heroes and innocent victims), but even more are very conventional-seeming people who have simply lost or never developed compassion; Bloch disliked his monsters, but like most of the best crime (and horror) fiction writers could help you understand them and their actions. The students of Bloch, from Richard Matheson to Joe R. Lansdale, from Stephen King (who needs to brush up on his lessons) to Gahan Wilson, have gone on to give us work that sometimes rivals that of the unassuming, genuinely and unnecessarily modest, revolutionizer of at least two fields of writing (Bloch and Fritz Leiber were the acolytes of H.P. Lovecraft who took what was most important about HPL's work and developed it further, and did so in much better prose than Lovecraft cared to strive for). Bloch is the Hammett/Hemingway/Heinlein figure in horror fiction, the one who turned the field back toward the lean and straightforward prose Bierce and the Edwardians had been moving toward, and incorporated developments in psychology and psychiatry in his portrayals of existential terror. And he gave the literary world the kind of human monster who might need our help, but whom we definitely needed to control.Blood Runs Cold is a good slice of Bloch's work in his early years as already a master of his art.

Contents, all illustrated by Edward Gorey:Introduction: The Castle of Terror by Henry Mazzeo The Lonesome Place by August Derleth In the Vault by H. P. Lovecraft The Man Who Collected Poe by Robert Bloch Where Angels Fear by Manly Wade Wellman Lot No. 249 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Haunted Dolls’ House by M. R. James The Open Door by Mrs. Oliphant Thus I Refute Beelzy by John Collier Levitation by Joseph Payne Brennan The Ghostly Rental by Henry James The Face by E. F. Benson The Whistling Room by William Hope Hodgson The Grey Ones by J. B. Priestley The Stolen Body by H. G. Wells The Red Lodge by H. Russell Wakefield The Visiting Star by Robert Aickman Midnight Express by Alfred NoyesThis might be the most important book to me among all those I've read. It's certainly, among the four or five horror anthologies I read by the time I was eight, one of only two aimed at adults (the other was the Berkley paperback edited by Hal Cantor, Ghosts and Things), and the one which I remember best (odd how few women's stories were collected in either this or the Cantor, which featured only Shirley Jackson's "The Lovely House" in that wise, though Betty M. Owen's Scholastic Book Services anthologies and the Robert Arthur and Harold Q. Masur Hitchcock anthologies helped redress that balance). Happily for me, perhaps (foolishly) because of the Gorey illustrations, this one was classed in the children's section of the Enfield Central Public Library, where I found it easily enough (not that having to go over to the adult section to find, say, Joan Aiken's collection The Green Flash was any great trial).This book introduced me to all these geniuses, though of course I'd heard of Sherlock Holmes before reading Doyle's detective-free mummy story here, and had probably seen adaptations of at least some of these folks' works on Night Gallery, or in Bloch's case, his Star Trek scripts, and the George Pal productions of adaptations from that other familiar name, H. G. Wells. Despite the attempts by some reviewers to claim this book for the ghost story tradition, Mazzeo cast his net considerably wider than that, including revenants other than Doyle's mummy, devils (or at least one Assumes they're devils) in at least one of the wittiest stories here (John Collier lets you know, after all, with his title, and Manly Wade Wellman is only a bit more coy in labeling his tale of a place you don't want to be). M. R. James traps children with a toy, Alfred Noyes with a book; Joseph Payne Brennan, with his best story and one of his shortest, traps the childish, and even H. P. Lovecraft is represented by one of his least self-indulgent stories. Derleth shows what he could do, when not attempting to corrupt Lovecraft's legacy into a Christian metaphor, and Wells's stolen body story is an improvement over the "Elvesham" variation collected by Damon Knight in his The Dark Side. J. B. Priestly, a diverse man of letters, I would next encounter primarily as the author (and reader, for a Spoken Arts recording) of his essay collection Delight, which was indeed delightful; Robert Aickman, while also expert on the waterways of Britain, remained for me and many others the greatest of ghost-story writers of the latter half of the 20th Century, even with Russell Kirk and Joanna Russ and Charles Grant and so many others providing excellent contributions to that literature. That obscure fellow James and E. F. Benson (not yet rediscovered for his comedies of manners, and only one of three prolific Benson brothers in the horror field) were the only writers shared by both this book and the Cantor; the Hodgson is a Carnacki story, a fine introduction to psychic investigators.And the Gorey illustrations will stay with anyone (Fritz Leiber, in his review of the book in his column in the magazine Fantastic, notes the sequence of the Gorey illustrations on the front and back covers tell their own story). This book essentially introduced me to lifelong favorites Bloch, Collier, Benson and Wellman, and even the weakest stories here were rewarding; the Noyes, like the Brennan, is almost certainly the best thing he wrote (at least in prose or the uncanny) and a landmark in the field. I see where Gahan Wilson reviewed this for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1969, Fritz Leiber somewhat belatedly for Fantastic in 1973...I still need to find my, or a, copy of the F&SF/Wilson...for that matter, I will need to read this book again, eventually, and see how completely all of these have stuck with me. And, as far as I know, Mazzeo never published another book.

4 comments:

Mike Stamm
said...

I should sit down one day and compare my various Bloch collections; I have 34.6* Bloch books on the shelf (not counting the BEST OF, which may be gone or just somewhere else), 9 of which are novels. In 1962 Belmont issued a follow-up to NIGHTMARES, entitled (of course) MORE NIGHTMARES, which it says is made up of stories from PLEASANT DREAMS (completing that TOC?) and THE OPENER OF THE WAY. Since I don't have a copy of either Arkham House collection (alas), it's hard to tell. I do know that I don't have all of his books, and that he wrote quite a bit more than I thought he did. I got a copy of THE SKULL OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE, issued after the Amicus (?) film THE SKULL came out, and the story "Lizzie Borden Took an Axe" unnerved me so badly (I think I was 12) that I stapled those pages together for years so I wouldn't risk reading it again...

Yes, the Belmont mixes and matches, and sitting down with ISFDB can help sort it out (I have a copy of the 1972 magazine-format (pirate?) version of BLOCH AND BRADBURY, listed by ISFDB as WHISPERS FROM BEYOND, which adds mostly anonymously-authored filler essays, in one or another of the unopened storage boxes, which I hope to uncover sooner rather than later...).